Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks with a MacBook Air behind him during an Apple special event at the Howard Gilman Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music before the start of an Apple event in New York, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2018.(Photo: JUSTIN LANE, EPA-EFE)

Could you get by with 128GB of storage? Not easily – as I learned from owning a MacBook Air with that allocation and from providing tech support to a family member with one who used it far less intensively. Both Macs regularly needed housecleaning to free up space to install Apple’s operating-system upgrades.

Among competing Windows laptops, most offer more storage and charge less to upgrade that. The cheapest model of the HP Spectre x360, for instance, starts with a 256GB SSD, and ordering that with a 512GB drive adds only $80. The Lenovo Yoga 920 also includes at least a 256GB SSD, and it’s $130 more for a configuration with double the storage and a faster processor.

The Dell XPS 13, however, includes just a 128GB SSD in its low-end version and a model with a 256GB SSD – which also doubles the memory from an inadequate 4GB to 8GB and ups the processor – costs $310 extra.

Meanwhile, Apple itself doesn’t think 128GB is an acceptable minimum on other Macs. The 12-inch MacBook offers at least 256GB; the iMac normally includes a 1 TB hard drive, but if you replace that with an SSD you can buy only a 256GB model in its entry-level configuration, with higher-capacity SSDs available on more expensive iMac systems.

Apple PR did not answer an email asking about the logic behind this pattern.

“I think Apple’s strategy is as simple as extracting as much ASP (average selling price) as they can for the vaunted Apple experience,” Vena said. He added that Apple won’t lose if it sells iCloud subscriptions instead: Compared to the one-time revenue of a storage upgrade, that recurring revenue “will likely be higher over the lifecycle of the customer.”

On both the Air and the mini, you have no options besides paying Apple’s price for upgrading the internal storage. The Mac repair site iFixit dismantled an Air and a mini and found that both have their SSDs soldered to their logic boards.

(That inspection, however, revealed that the mini’s memory is relatively easy to replace if you’d rather not pay $200 to go from 8GB to 16GB. “We’re going to launch a RAM upgrade kit for it ...” CEO Kyle Wiens wrote in an email.)

The mini’s array of ports does allow for the possibility of plugging in an external SSD – 512GB models cost $100 and change at retail – at the cost of cluttering your desktop a little more. What’s your price for a tidy computer setup?